Tag: Denial

People blame the narcissist’s victim before recognizing if ever, much less acknowledging, that they are victims of the narcissist as well.

You gambled on a charismatic if not-very-clever con that sold you a bill of goods and lost. You’d of had better odds at one of his defunct casinos. But that false hope snake oil was so velvety smooth going down your throat, felt so good pumping through your veins that you ignored those who tried to warn you, laughed in our face, insisted that we were fools to resist such manna and shut out everything but the drug itself. And while that’s not entirely your fault – a life-long huckster played you for a fool, preying on your fear and desperation – the responsibility to discern the truth was yours. And now the cost comes due.

And you will pay the price.

Humiliation is only the beginning. Stubborn denial of the terrible truth that you gave yourself over willingly to a charlatan who tossed you aside after he was done wiping his fat, pampered ass with you won’t save you from extinction. Accepting that awful reality gives you back the power that he took from you to change it.

… or have yourself a very Trumpy Christmas and see how righteous indignation keeps you and everything you hold dear warm, nourished and protected in the dead of winter. 🌨️🎄

The closest thing to validation I’ve ever received from a Family member or their extended group of acquaintances (the tribe, if you will) was from Sister. One day she called me and described how she’d witnessed, first hand, Mother shamelessly, repeatedly lying about any small thing, undercutting the parental authority of her husband in regards to their adopted daughter and in spite of confronting her on these untruths. Sister tells me it occurred to her then, “Now I know how Tarraccas must feel.”

And that was it.

I was a little suspicious of her motivations for telling me this but I appreciated that Sister connected a couple dots, attempted to understand and relate to my experience. But she couldn’t know how I felt because Mother wasn’t lying about her. She lies about me. And in spite of almost bonding over this briefly shared awareness, Sister believed those lies. Everyone in the tribe does. It’s more of a cult that way.

They just can’t believe, even with first-hand evidence, that Mother could or would hurt anyone, especially not one of her own children. Perish the thought! Which only leaves me. I must’ve misunderstood or I’m just too sensitive or too angry or too something — they never ask because they apparently don’t care what I actually think or how I really feel. That’s all bullshit. In any case, I need to forgive, forget and get with the program and that’s all there is to it.

[P]eople do not like disrupting the status quo, and if they get information that doesn’t compute with their experience of a person – it’s destabilizing, and it’s easier to doubt your reality then to possibly have to face a new one. Treat this as a wakeup call – don’t take your vulnerabilities to people who do this to you any longer, find more humane listeners who receive your difficult words with compassion.

For anyone who finds themselves betrayed by one’s tribe, those who we trusted to have our back only for them to stab us in it: these are not your people. Find a new tribe.

When someone who’s hurt us behaves as though nothing is wrong, they deny what we feel. When confronted and reacting as though we’ve hurt them, they deny us once again and put a fiction in our place.

And in their place, we move through the subsequent Kubler-Ross stages of grief for them as externalized ego-functions of them. We’re infuriated, confused. We try desperately to reason with them, to save both ourselves and the relationship. And when it becomes dreadfully apparent that it is we, not they, who must choose one or the other then we feel sadness. It is at this critical juncture, this decision at this point that separates the narcissist and their enablers from we who survive and succeed them.